Why they say spyware is good for you

Sony rightly came under fire last week from programmers and Internet
users for injecting an undetectable copy-prevention utility into
Microsoft Windows when certain CDs are inserted.

Now the lawyers are taking aim, too. Robert Green, a partner at the San Francisco firm of Green Welling, says he’s readying a class action lawsuit against Sony.

“We’re still investigating
the case and talking to different people about what happened to them,”
Green said on Friday. He plans to argue that under California law, if
you buy a copy-protected CD from a music store, you should be informed
that a spyware-like utility will be implanted on your hard drive.

The fuss last week began when Mark Russinovich, a Windows programmer and author, posted a description of how he traced some mysterious processes and hidden files on his computer back to SonyBMG’s “Get Right with the Man” CD. It turned out that they were part of Sony’s digital rights management technology designed to thwart illicit copying.

It’s a wacky result when both Sony and its hapless customers could be embroiled in legal hot water at the same time.

Still, it may be too late for the entertainment giant to fend off the plaintiff’s bar. One recent court case in Illinois, Soleto v. DirectRevenue, sets a nonbinding precedent that lawyers expect to be invoked against Sony.

In that case, DirectRevenue was sued for installing spyware on
Windows computers without obtaining proper authorization from a user.
U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman said the company could be sued on
trespass, Illinois consumer fraud, negligence, and computer tampering
grounds.

Then there’s a California spyware-related law
that says a company may not “induce” anyone to “install a software
component” by claiming installation is necessary to “open, view or play
a particular type of content.”

Translation: Sony could be in double trouble. Its Windows software
is hardly necessary to play music–the disc works just fine on a
Macintosh or in an old-fashioned CD player.

Wu noted that one possible reprieve might come from last year’s ruling from a federal appeals court in a case dealing with garage door openers–it said no copyright violations were taking place, so no DMCA violation occurred. Then again, another federal appeals court objected to bypassing anticopying technology used in DVDs, which is probably a closer analogy.

A bizarre resultIf your head isn’t spinning by now, it
should be. It’s a wacky result when both Sony and its hapless customers
could be embroiled in legal hot water at the same time.

These citations to state laws, federal statutes and common law torts
above should demonstrate an obvious point: The American legal system
is, all too often, used as a weapon against businesses or individuals
who can’t hope to comply with every regulation on the books.
Entrepreneurs write checks to law firms instead of developing products.
Guilt and innocence turn too often on technicalities rather than

whether an action was inherently right or wrong.

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Why? As Manhattan Institute fellow Walter Olson documents on OverLawyered.com,
our legal system is set up to encourage lawsuits. They’re easy to file
and difficult to dismiss. Plus, politicians receive attention by
enacting new laws, not by repealing them. No wonder the Federal
Register was growing by between 55,000 and 70,000 pages annually even by the first Bush presidency.

In one 1999 class action lawsuit ostensibly filed on behalf of flight
attendants against tobacco companies, for instance, the attendants
received nothing in the settlement. But the lawyers pocketed $49
million. After Microsoft’s federal antitrust suit was over, dozens of class action suits sprouted, yielding negligible benefits for consumers–but fat paychecks for the lawyers involved.

Of course, malicious behavior that harms someone else should be
unlawful. But whatever happened to the concept of a few basic
rules–don’t steal, don’t commit fraud–rather than thousands of pages
of bureaucratelia that few of us can hope to understand, let alone
follow?

Biography

Declan McCullagh
is CNET News.com’s Washington, D.C., correspondent. He chronicles the
busy intersection between technology and politics. Before that, he
worked for several years as Washington bureau chief for Wired News. He
has also worked as a reporter for The Netly News, Time magazine and
HotWired.